Author: Seanbaby

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: It Won’t Last Forever🌭

Two weeks ago we published an article about No Longer Afraid, a book for dying children by the pediatric tragedy team of Doris Sanford and Graci Evans. I ended it with a warning: it would get worse. Today we’re going to read 1993’s It Won’t Last Forever: A Child’s Book About Living With a Depressed Parent, and it’s worse. Than everything.

As always, Doris thought about the delicate subject she was writing about and came up with a title that meant sideways of nothing. A book about living with a terminally depressed parent called It Won’t Last Forever is like a bag of used COVID swabs named Your Future is Magic. It doesn’t help describe anything, and later people will say, “What was the name of that sad thing? It was weird… like ‘Try Your Best, Melissa’ or something.” 

Try Your Best Melissa, I think, is dedicated to MIKE BURCH, the author’s son-in-law. And to the parents of any of my future wives, if you want to make a picture book about a sad lady who can’t get off the couch, please don’t dedicate it to me. Judging from this, I don’t think I’ll take it as a compliment. “With adoration and a full heart I dedicate this depression manual to the lazy son of a bitch who married my daughter– a sad piece of shit and inadequate husband.“

The very first page of Sorry, Can’t Remember drops us right into the grim situation– young Kristen’s mother has left her to take care of her baby brother. The art of Graci Evans really shines here. Not because these are well-rendered abandoned children. In fact, this is almost an art lesson in why you shouldn’t use the same values for your foreground and background. But something about these billions of fussy scratches made unexpertly by cheap colored pencils communicates to the viewer, “all existence is suffering.” If you showed this page to someone who had never seen words before they would know those little shapes above the crib are describing something terrible.

Kristen’s mother is in rough shape. She’s recently unemployed and divorced and has no hobbies other than weeping into Kleenex. Graci has chosen to draw her as a bloated swamp corpse getting its eyes eaten by clams, and thanks once again to MIKE BURCH, the author’s son-in-law, for whatever his role was in this.

Eventually the mother goes out looking for work, so she leaves the baby with literally the most nearby person, her neighbor Mrs. Gerhart. Mrs. G, shown here demonstrating one brave artist’s struggle with drawing feet, seems almost suspiciously eager to watch the baby. She is helped by Barbara, “her special friend,” which seems like something elderly lesbians might have called their wives in 1993, but there’s no other reference to why their friendship is so special. All we know about them is that when you hand them a random baby and then ask for it back, they say no.

If Doris was a more talented writer I would think this deliberately vague title along with Mrs. G’s reluctance to end her babysitting sessions would be foreshadowing some dark twist. Are she and Barbara a childless couple looking to steal a baby? Cultists looking to eat one? But no, it’s just a turn of strange choice of words in a series of strange choices.

The thing about Doris Sanford is she is a well-intentioned, kind-hearted idiot. And we need to keep that context in mind here, because I don’t think it’s supposed to feel menacing when the book cuts to Kristen in a swimsuit getting grabbed by the special friend of a neighbor under the words “Barbara was alone with Kristen.” These aren’t warning signs of an impending kidnapping and this really is just a book about depression.

It should not alarm us that Barbara seems to have been watching Kristen’s family for quite some time. The author simply thinks it’s normal for your apartment community’s activity director to know everyone’s untreated emotional disorders and disclose medical history to their children while they are alone with them and have them mostly undressed.

Kristen takes what she has learned about depression and confronts her mother with it. She says to the woman who was recently laid off and divorced, “All you care about is yourself. Why did you get depressed anyway?” Then she finds the new bottle of sleeping pills some doctor prescribed to the depressed woman who sleeps all day. Good authors write what they know, and I’m not sure why I brought that up. Anyway, Doris Sanford stories take place in a world where every single person is dumb as fuck and wrong about everything.

So let me get this straight, book. Kristen said to her suffering mother, “All you care about is yourself,” then finds a bottle of obvious suicide pills and makes the conscious choice to leave them. Then her mother tries to kill herself. And this little girl is the protagonist? If this girl turned to the reader and smiled, not a single reader would be surprised.

I also want to throw it out there, how the random neighbor unwilling to return children after babysitting them found a dead body with a note that basically said, “I give my kids, the ones who have a grandmother mentioned earlier in the book, to the terrific lady who discovers my remains and her special friend, bye.”

I guess this is good news, but Kristen’s mom survives and gets released from the hospital weeks later. She also starts taking medication and “reading helpful books,” a phrase that carries an element of terror when written by a woman who spent a decade publishing dangerously insane “helpful books.” And speaking of Doris Sanford’s decisions, on this page we find out the girl who instantly recognized nonbenzodiazepines as a suicide method is pretty sure Easter bunny isn’t real.

But she’s wrong.

Dead wrong.

So Whatever This Book Was Called, a tale of depression and suicide, has a happy ending! The special friend of Kristen’s babysitter, the one who became her “legal guardian” after finding her mother’s body, dressed up like a bunny and leapt from the shadows when she was alone! I hope this helped, children of sad parents!

…
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Micah Phillips: Take off the Easter Bunny suit, Hot Dog Supreme Micah Phillips. Take it off… slowly.

Categories
LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: How to Have a Moneymaking GARAGE SALE Starring Phyllis Diller 🌭

If you’re stupid enough, general knowledge seems like expertise. If you’re stupider still, puppets seem like a trick. If you’re stupider still, you are the customer base for 1987’s How to Have a Moneymaking GARAGE SALE Starring Phyllis Diller. It defies no expectations at all. It’s 24 minutes of basic instructions for putting price tags on garbage along with several tips you couldn’t possibly not already know Starring Phyllis Diller.

The tape already knows you need to have a garage sale by the nature of you owning the least necessary instructional VHS tape. How to Have a Moneymaking GARAGE SALE’s first and main purpose is to help you rid yourself of it. You need to turn Trash Into Cashβ„’, Old Into Goldβ„’, and your Precious Time into Pointless Rhymesβ„’!

Besides owning a garage, unlimited leisure time, and a retail store’s worth of unwanted appliances, the tape also assumes you already have a strong working knowledge of Phyllis Diller. Maybe this is maybe something you could take for granted in 1987, but in 2021 most of her jokes sound like code to activate deep cover operatives. For instance, it opens with her screaming, “I haven’t had this many people in my garage since the vice squad raided Fang’s Going Out of Marriage party! Sliiide whistle! Honnnk!” This was a reference to her fictional husband, Fang, who was at all times cheating on her, divorced from her, a pain in her ass, dead, or a loyal friend and provider. From Phyllis’ age and the era you might assume “Fang” had dark, racist origins, but the name was distilled down from an old ad-libbed line about a traffic accident where she called her husband “Old Fang Face.”

This was apparently such common knowledge at the time the producers of How to Have a Moneymaking GARAGE SALE figured you knew it, yet needed a VHS tape explaining how to write “25 cents” on a box of coffee mugs.

To be clear: for anyone who needed a celebrity host for a yard sale video, Phyllis Diller was a perfectly appropriate choice. She was the right amount of famous where everyone knew her but no one would say, “How the fuck did they get Phyllis Diller for this?” And as far as instructional videos go, no one has gotten more for their money than these producers. Phyllis Diller brings an energy to this like someone honored to be hosting the Daytime Emmy Awards. And while she does have strong acting and broadcast skills, you can’t fake this kind of enthusiasm. This is a woman with a true passion for the craft of garage saling. She never stops screaming about it. “Who knows more about turning trash into cash than me? I’ve been doing it for YEARS! Wha ha ha!” She had no notes when the script called for her to barge into the room with a trash bag exclaiming…

The video never misses an opportunity to add a joke, and I emphatically don’t mean that as a compliment. For example, when Phyllis suggests you gather unwanted items from around your home to use in your garage sale, she opens a closet full of tumbling props and says, “That was about a six on the Richter scale!” Then she holds up a pair of antlers and a clown nose and says, “Poor Rudolph never saw that land mine!” I’m not saying the video would be better if it was 40 seconds of her growling, “Here is the entire one step to selling old pajamas, you stupid shits.” I’m only saying this is very bad. I mean, for one thing, Rudolph is basically always in the air except at the north pole or on the roofs of non-naughty children. Are you telling me someone climbed onto the roof of a nice family, on Christmas, and land mined their home? An unspeakable act that killed a rare, innocent animal and presumably the magical spirit of Christmas? And this is funny to you, Phyllis!? Before we get to the yard sale, ha ha, let’s fucking molest the remains of Santa’s loyal companion!?

According to Phyllis Diller’s handwritten list, one of the things you need to do before a garage sale is “INSURANCE AND LAWS.” So she calls her insurance agent who recognizes her voice and hangs up on her. She groans, “Wrong number,” followed by a string of words delivered with the cadence of jokes but with all the meaning of a confused reindeer’s final screams. Again, it would be weirder if How to Have a Moneymaking GARAGE SALE Starring Phyllis Diller was good, but it seems a strange indulgence to write the entire script by carving the language center out of a a human brain and transcribing the shrieks of the ravens feeding on it.

Another thing you need to do before your garage sale is call your neighbors to see if they have anything to sell. Then check the paper to see if there are any big sporting or television events that might distract potential customers from your big event. You don’t want to compete for a market share against ABC’s All-Star Salute to Lawns Full of Trash. Also on Phyllis’ list, and this may really tickle you is “TOM SELLECK’S PHONE NUMBER sliiiiiiide whistle.” It’s the second of three “I’m trying to fuck Tom Selleck” jokes in the video, and Phyllis expertly punctuates this one by circling the words “TOM SELLECK’S PHONE NUMBER” several times and nothing else. I feel like I’m not explaining all the subtleties, but she wants actor Tom Selleck to have sex with her and his name is Tom Selleck.

At this point, the tips come at the viewer fast. You get advice on market values, how to make signs, and why you should wash used clothes. It starts to become pretty clear from Phyllis’ excitement and the numbers getting thrown around that this isn’t about the money. Even in the filmmakers’ wildest imagination, this well-organized and celebrity-promoted garage sale looks like it’s hoping to make about forty bucks. Phyllis Diller would get double the profits if she threw her trash into the ocean and asked her plastic surgeon to use generic dermal fillers. Speaking of, there are eight (8) facelift jokes in this video sliiide whistle, honk. That’s an average of one every three minutes, and please understand they are not a part of a long running gag. They are each distinct and less fun than the last. The side effect of learning how to hold a garage sale is that you will no longer find joy in the skin thinly stretched across Phyllis Diller’s skull.

“WOULD YOU LOOK AT THIS PUP TENT! honk arrooooga,” is how Phyllis uses her dynamic prop comedy to tell you maternity clothes are a hot ticket item at garage sales. And while that’s technically “knowledge,” if I was a new mother trying to get rid of stuff, it might already occur to me to include the clothes I would never wear again. This is like informing someone who already ordered lunch that soup is wet food, like the dripping holes near Tom Selleck.

Have we talked shoes yet? You should be sure to wear functional garage sale shoes. Or as Phyllis puts it…

There is so much time spent on advice you couldn’t conceivably not know they spend no time explaining complicated things. For instance, Phyllis walks past a homemade changing room saying, “You’ll need a ladder, a shower curtain, and a closet dowel from the lumber yard!” And instead of explaining how to MacGyver (Richard Dean Anderson, yum! sliiiide whistle) together a dressing room with debris and no fasteners, she peeks into it, shatters the mirror, and screams, “YOU’D THINK AFTER FIFTEEN FACE LIFTS THAT WOULD STOP. AH HA! horrrrn sound.” Hilarious, sure, but the viewer is no closer to knowing how to build a retail space in their garage. It’s fucked up they assume I’m an accomplished junkyard architect maternity dress collector but I don’t understand how stickers work. They’re more confused than Fang trying to order sushi at the Aladdin while the surgical staples behind his wife’s ears detached!

There’s an entire section of the tape about the outrageous characters you’ll run into at a garage sale. It is a perfect setup to comedy hijinx, but instead it’s the least fun, instructional part of this instructional video. It prepares you for the inevitability of hardnose bargaining and petty thievery that comes with turning your home into a flea market. It still has some jokes about how her face is more basketball than flesh and how her genitals are loveless deserts long since abandoned by Fang and never to be explored by Tom Selleck. It’s frankly so far past the point of self-deprecation I looked up the writer to see how he knew Phyllis Diller well enough to dunk on her unfuckable sadness over and over like this.

It was written by someone who only had one credit on an episode of Hollywood Squares, a show Phyllis Diller was on frequently. So this may explain how they got a call with Phyllis Diller’s agent, but not how they had the confidence to hand her this many jokes about her ancient face and vagina flesh. When you’re putting together a garage sale VHS, it takes huge balls to hand your celebrity host a script that says, “I’m a fucking gross piece of shit and here’s how you price used paperbacks.” I should know. I was stabbed 40 times by Rob Van Winkle after he saw the script for Make Your Own Gourmet Sorbet Starring That Asshole Vanilla Ice SLIIIIIDE WHISTLE, HONK HOOOONKK.

One other type of garage sale customer to watch out for is The Nitpicker. He’s the type of person who will yell at you for not keeping your appliances in perfect condition. He w– wait. I think I recognize The Nitpicker. Used (Works!) COOLVIEW TV/VCR Combo, enhance:

No. N-no, it can’t be.

Jesus Christ, it is! IT IS! This is fucking Master Eastwest, from The Magic of Martial Arts! He’s a mysterious being with all the powers of the Orient who teaches children Karate in his cave, and here he is causing a scene over a garage sale’s return policy on a six inch television. He is angry, entitled, and seems to be blaming Phyllis Diller for a series of bad turns his life took. His every acting choice seems to have been made for a revenge movie about a garage sale customer pushed too far. And maybe it’s because a child-abducting Karate ghost is losing its temper on the set, but there is a serious tone change here at the end of How to Have a Moneymaking GARAGE SALE Starring Phyllis Diller. Off camera voices start demanding to use her phone and bathroom and she worriedly explains how dangerous a garage full of deal-hunting strangers can be.

Then, in what I think is a coincidence and not a potential murderer gag, a seven foot man emerges from the bargain wasteland with garden shears leveled at Phyllis Diller’s neck. “Three dollars,” is all he says as his hands tremble ready on the handles. The point is, the two unhinged madmen brandishing deadly weapons at the star (garden shears and cave Karate) really drive home the accidental theme of the video: there is no idea worse than having a moneymaking garage sale.

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

Punching Day: YOUNG, ALERT, and AWARE

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Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: No Longer Afraid 🌭

Doris Sanford and Graci Evans are a creative team dedicated to producing a book about every possible pediatric trauma. They produced a book to very specifically help kids deal with life in a Japanese POW camp and another for survivors of nude Satanic daycares, as I will bring up every time Doris and Graci are mentioned for the rest of my life.

Today we’re looking at No Longer Afraid, a story about cancer, and I want to remind everyone this book was not a single act of poor judgment. These women dedicated their lives to turning all childhood misery into saccharine weirdness and we’re making fun of them, not, you know, cancer. It’s what academics refer to as “The Reluctantly Acceptable Cancer Joke Author/Reader Relationship.” So let’s cancer up and do this shit, reader!

Like most of their books, No Longer Afraid was named after a turn of phrase so unrelated to the subject no one will ever be able to remember it. It’s safe to assume no one owns more copies of their work than me, and if you held a gun to my head and asked me what a Sanford/Evans CHILDREN OF COURAGE entry was about based on the title, I’d have to guess “wheelchair sadness?” and hope you weren’t a super pedantic quiz murderer.

This book not only seems bad at comforting the children it was written for, it’s absurd to picture No Longer Afraid getting to them. Its intended audience would have to say to a librarian, “The doctors gave me two sad faces and three question marks to live, so I’m in a bit of a hurry. Do you have… oof, what was it called? Some generic platitude. There, There, Kid? No… something like Could Be Worse, I Guess? It’s about terminal pediatric cancer, but they didn’t want to put that in the title, obviously. Oh! It might be Wishes Have Dream Wings? Ha ha I should have really gathered my thoughts before I started asking questions. Look, can you just point me to the section for indelicate storybooks for Beginners and The Traumatized by authors with no child psychology experience? Oh, you don’t have one? It sounds like I’m kidding? Well, suck my dick too, ma’am.”

One hallmark of Doris Sanford’s writing is how she helps the reader understand a child’s suffering through a child’s perspective. I’ll give you an example. When Jaime’s dad explains to her how dire her biopsy results were, she asks, “Daddy, is there a Taco Bell in heaven?” No answer. If another author wrote this you might find meaning in it– an allegory for the darker tragedy of death coming for this child too innocent to dread it and too stupid to have a point of reference outside of tacos. But with Doris, it’s nothing more than a dumb person blurting Taco Bell into the void. She might as well have asked, “Does God give you extra hot sauce if He fucking kills you when you’re five? And wait, who works, cough, at a Taco Bell in heaven? The four-year-olds He kills? Ha ha I should have really gathered my, cough, thoughts before I started asking questions.”

Doris never wrote a book explicitly for children who are stupid as shit, but it’s a trait all of her characters share whether they’re dying of leukemia, the product of divorce, or watching their house burn down. An eight-year-old in a Doris Sanford book might look at a briefcase and ask what happened to that cat and if it knows what to do with this handful of poop.

To make matters worse, the wise adult characters stuck with the job of explaining complicated things like God’s merciless, arbitrary child murder are also stupid. So, for example, a conversation about chemotherapy might have one character repeating, “Huh?” while the other one tells them nonsense like, “Chemotherapy is like weeds! Wait wait, it’s more like Pac-Man, the arcade hit from when you were negative 7, kind of going to war?” If this sounds more like a specific reference than a joke, you’re right!

Jaime seems satisfied with that Pac-Man explanation, or maybe she has been trained to ask “Is this my fault?” every time her mom says forty fucking crazy things in a row. Either way, Doris and Graci are ready to move on to the lighter side of cancer– the way your hair falls out! I wish I was kidding when I said the next twenty pages are about how much fun bald children are for everyone.

If you’d like a look inside the workings of a genius mind, Doris’ comfort to young cancer readers is, “In the children’s cancer unit at the hospital she would have looked strange with hair!” She should have gone all the way with it and had Jaime’s mother point to a new fully-haired patient and say, “Your head looks like a lollipop yanked off of Steven Seagal’s naked back! You shit. You garbage gorilla monster. My daughter is going to rip that louse nest from your bitch ass scalp. Kick this hairy sick kid’s ass, Jaime!”

This decision? To not do that and instead type out the lyrics to an arcane Christian lullaby? Pure cowardice. A brave writer would say something closer to: Anyone finding solace in these transcribed lyrics from Steve Siler’s “Don’t Fear the Night,” Used by permission, should maybe consider how they don’t deserve any kind of comfort? They were given a human brain and heart and squandered them both.

As I promised, the author further explores Jaime’s baldness. Nearly as troubling as Jaime’s health issues is the fact that her mother’s first idea, in this blonde girl’s most vulnerable moment, was gluing an orange clown wig to her hair. Did she walk into the store and say, “Hi, my daughter recently learned what death is and how it’s breathing down her neck. Yeah, I know, right? Anyway, this bald look was popular back in her cancer ward but now I’m thinking maybe something i– oooh, how much is the red afro? That would be hilarious. Do I get a discount if it makes her cry? Ha ha I should really gather my thoughts before I start asking questions.”

You might be wondering how all of Jaime’s friends reacted to her chemotherapy wig. No? You say that’s an unimportant detail of a subject already very, very covered? Well, they loved it. They all passed it around, trying it on. “Oh, give me a hit off your ventilator!” one girl interrupted after seeing an elderly man enjoying the park. “Let me use that plastic leg, fucker!” shouted another at a nearby veteran. “I’m Aqua Fat, the meat-lover’s submarine captain!” laughed a third as she drove an obese woman’s mobility scooter into a lake. “They. Were the same. Kids who stole. My electrolarynx.” croaked a man through a hole in his neck after the police arrived.

It’s still going? Jesus Christ. Wait, is the first bald joke, “Hey, Jaime, I like your chemo cut?” Fucking “Hey, Jaime, I like your chemo cut!?” Doris, you goddamn bitch, maybe don’t quote the poor kid’s least creative bullies in the book about her slow death. Oh, and nice work on Jaime’s brilliant response. “My father is Kojak?” Yeah, that works. Because that show went off the air before her parents met and everyone knows how bald men pass their scalp genes onto their grade school daughters. What I’m trying to say here is if their editor called this book Watch Us Belittle This Dumbshit Sick Kid, they wouldn’t have to change a single other thing.

If you want to write authentic child voices, you need to speak their language. Like how kids say things like, “Get real!” and “Eva Gabor references!” I mean, I get the stakes are low here. It’s only a book for fragile kids coping with mortality, but is this the best Doris could do? She might as well have said, “Do I like my wig? Oy, fellow fourth graders, I like my wig like I like my second and fourth husbands– stuffed in a box and with a good insurance policy! Now, kiddo, can you tell me how much sodium is in these crackers? I left my reading glasses in my other Bea Arthur windbreaker and if I have too much salt my joints creak like the Lusitania! I… m-mean I’m ten! Pac-Man sure is turbo bad, maximum homeboys!”

And not to pile on the criticism, but I think we can all agree that when everyone you know has tried on your wig and local birds have littered your life with multiple nests made from the remains of your real hair, we have fully explored every aspect of your baldness journey. It might be time to shut the fuck up about how delightfully shiny this kid’s head is, Doris. Let’s move on to the Make-A-Wish part, the other thing Doris and Graci know about this terribl(y fun!) disease.

Jaime likes horses, which seems normal for a young girl. In fact, I’d argue “cancer girl loses hair and asks Make-A-Wish for a horse” is suspiciously normal– like the very first idea for a cancer storybook plot by an unremarkable writer. And when Jaime is moved to tears by everyone’s support, a strange horse judge says, “I think your happiness is leaking out of your eyes. (It was!)” Jesus Christ. What? This whole thing is such an ordinary idea executed by people with good intentions, but Doris and Graci are just incapable of not making things weird. They are somehow simultaneously the pioneers, the clichΓ© hacks, and the Turkish knockoffs of sadness picture books.

Doris waits until the second-to-last page to deliver No Longer Afraid’s titular line: “She was no longer afraid of the dark.” She set this powerful moment up masterfully, by never once mentioning the main character being afraid of the dark. This might as well have said, “Jaime was one step closer to her goal of being a celebrity cookie chef, a hobby of hers we edited out to make room for more bald jokes, here’s a horse shoe.”

“Graci, this book has been a wonderful journey. We gave a kid every kind of cancer, explained it perfectly with Pac-Man kind of going to war, and she met a horse once. I don’t have an ending, so let’s add 17 pages of kids mocking her baldness? She’s probably dead by now, but let’s not end it on a grave. Can you draw, like, a horse restraint? Then it’s another one in the bag! Let me know if you have any ideas for the next book. I’m thinking WATCHING YOUR UNEMPLOYED SINGLE MOM COMMIT SUICIDE?”

-Doris

Possibly related: tune in in two weeks for Seanbaby’s next Upsetting Day…

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, yossarian: The Morgan Horse Restraint dream we never dared to speak aloud, for fear it would not come true.

 

Categories
NERDING DAY

The Dark Twist of Devil Stick

The definition for “nerd” changes 12.7(Ο€)Β² times faster than any other word. For instance, in our lifetime it has bounced between “panty unmoistening,” “socially unacceptable,” and “dangerously obsessive.” It can be confusing! But good news: I think I’ve found the Center of Nerd– an activity so dorky it anchors all variations or nuances of Nerd to a single constant:

In 1997, an original copy of DEVIL STICK on VHS retailed for $20 at JUGGLING CAPITOL. I assume today this mint-in-plastic copy is priceless, or was before I unsealed it after 23 years. DEVIL STICK is the no-budget project of Neil Stammer, a man who brags how much he loves an old Chinese toy called “devil sticks” though he mentions there was a mistranslation and they are, um, technically “flower sticks?” Neil loves devil sticks so much he moved to China for the proudly stated goal of getting better at manipulating them. Which brings me to my first criticism: Never has so much work gone into getting good at something so unimpressive. If you went on a decades long pilgrimage through Ukrainian factories to become the greatest sex doll sterilizer, your story would have a broader appeal than the man who moved to Asia to dedicate his life to twirling carnival sticks.

The first twenty minutes of the video is Neil alone, far from any microphone, in front of a black curtain. He has all the charm of a forensic pathologist explaining a morgue’s policy on outside snacks. If this doesn’t sound unpleasant enough, the soundtrack is entirely harmonica. On top of that, the video includes a steady hissing noise almost as loud as Neil and the harmonica. If you could die from being bad at producing VHS tapes, Neil Stammer’s body would have shattered into parts the moment he thought, “I should make a vide–“

The basics of devil sticks are simple– you bounce the devil stick back and forth between the two hand sticks. Neil warns it should take you a few days to a week to get the hang of this, which should be enough time to decide if you should really dedicate all this time to eliminating all sexual opportunities. Neil, arguably the world’s leading enthusiast for this hobby, doesn’t bother selling you on it. All this struggle to get to the endgame of “being able to devil stick” is like saying, “Digging through the garbage can be sad and messy, but every 72 hours you find an old yogurt lid!” Fucking use that as a pull quote on the DVD release of DEVIL STICK, Neil. Or this: Neil juggles batons with all the lifeless despair of a Ukrainian sex doll getting unsanitized.

Neil gives virtually none of the tips or advice you’d expect from an instructor of such a delicate art. Instead, he silently completes all the several possible tricks you can do with these things. It’s barely, barely better than secretly filming some asshole at a Renaissance faire and nowhere near as helpful as asking him, “Yon juggler, mayhaps you can illuminate me in the ways of these witchful sticks in exchange for watching me lay with my wife in the drench of her moon blood?”

Okay, this Under the Leg trick is pretty good.

Oh shit, Neil. Have I been wrong about how cool devil sticks are this whole time? If you picked up three sticks in front of a girl and said, “Oh, hey, I’ve seen these before. You kind of hit them back and forth?” and then you pulled this high kick? She would howl. Her uterus would fall out of her trying to get to you. She would die confused and horny and when the paramedics asked what the shit happened you would say, “I’m not sure. I was just hitting these sticks together and did a little, you know, kick like this.” And they would see it and all the flesh of their genitals would engorge together, dragging their shrieking, pain-wracked bodies toward your enchanting expression of talent.

Twelve minutes in and Neil is still robotically powering full speed through tricks. In many ways it’s pretty impressive. He’s got a passion that helped him create what has to be one of the top five most important works of devil stick media. He’s the best devil sticker I’ve seen, the only one I can name, and I feel so fucking bad for him and every choice he’s ever made. And with every trick chained together like this, you start to see how limited your options are when clacking a stick around. He’s like a Taco Bell chef putting a burrito inside another burrito, adding Cheetos, and giving the various states of this process 73 different names.

After fourteen minutes, Neil has run out of ideas and he’s been reduced to doing kickflips with the small sticks. It’s cute, and technically showmanship, but feels desperate. I don’t want to diminish how uniquely lame this is, but it’s like watching a modern dunk contest. Mankind finished inventing dunks decades ago, so dunk innovations are limited to adding a pointlessly weird bounce or putting on a cowboy hat first. Tricks like this tell a story more about the performer’s creative struggle than their amazing ability. And in one quarter of an hour, Neil Stammer has convinced me, passionately, that he and now we have seen everything devil sticks will ever offer. It is a tragedy. We are watching a man’s soul crawl further and further away from all meaning and joy while giving the limp sales pitch of “This Could Be YOU.” This VHS tape should be called Le Vide de L’ambition and screened in the Louvre.

Sure, I guess you haven’t wiggled the stick back and forth with one hand yet, Neil.

The first surprise of the film comes seventeen minutes in when Neil admits he never had time to think of a name for this trick other than “My Favorite Trick.” Which is silly because this is obviously “Mr. Juggler’s Cry for Help” or “The Talented Masturbator.” Neil, “Advanced Useless Endeavor, Behind the Back Variation” was right there. You could have called it “The Virgin Helicopter” or “Release Me From This Terrible Cycle, Devil Sticks (8 Minute Scream).”

I’m not sure Neil meant for this part to be left on the tape.

After showing you, just, fucking every possible trick, Neil goes out with a flaming, showstopping finale combining some of them. It’s a triumph! An inspiration! If you start now and dedicate yourself to devil sticks, this is the life you could have! So take that with you as you jou– wait, hold on. We’ve got these fire sticks and this dark driveway. You know what would make a fucking sweet ending for this video?

Oh, yeah. That’s a finale, Neil. Fire blow to darkness, fade in on JugglingCapitol.com, and that’s how you devil stick the crowd. By the way, I checked JugglingCapitol.com to see how they’re holding up in this post-devil stick interest world, and it’s very strange. This is either the new headquarters of some kind of juggler alternate reality game or the site owner handed over control to a WordPress robot and let it run wild. Here’s what it looks like today:

Indrani is a boring supermodel child of divorce who can’t process food in the daylight and JugglingCapitol.com has put her in charge of defeating a killer shark? This is nonsense. It’s nothing. For this I screwed up Neil’s perfect ending? Let’s pretend this never happened and backtrack a little. We’re going to go out Neil style:

Fuck yeah! Awesome!!

UPDATE 12/16/2020 11:00am PST

Jesus fucking Christ, it turns out the story of Neil Stammer’s devil stick did NOT have an awesome ending at all.

Categories
LEARNING DAY

365 Ways to Live Happy 🌭

During 1900🌭 survival training, we are taught to treat every assault on reality like a threat. The most dangerous lunacy is often hidden inside seemingly nice things like Christian joke books or pet massage manuals or the gentle affirmations of a self-appointed happiness coach.

365 ways to Live Happy: Simple Ways to Find Joy Every Day was written in 2010 by self-help author Meera Lester, a woman also not known for her beekeeper detective novels and Biblical nonfiction. She lists no formal education or background in psychology in her author bio, which means she tried to come up with three hundred and sixty five happiness tips using folksy wisdom and gut feelings alone. Let’s see how she did!

(These are all real and unmodified)

I’m not exaggerating when I say this woman sat down to write 365 ideas on being happy and the first one was to be happy. The second one was to smile, and then she ran out of ideas. Display a bowl of smashed flowers? These types of books always waffle between “duh” and “huh?” but this is literally as fast as an author could conceivably demonstrate their inadequacy. If she opens her next self-help book with “My nong is Meero, sorry name is Meera and i’m here two shit sadness into yor moth. Sorry yoo key is broken,” I would still say it’s a better opening than these three entries.

To give you an idea of how much struggle even the smallest thought is to Meera, her idea for #21 was “I don’t fucking know, go to church?” But then it occurred to her not everyone is Christian, so she, with great tolerance for Others, suggested they go to whichever their version is. You know, the beliefs core to you? Pursue those, weekly, is my suggestion as an author, or invent your own? Studies show research experts find there to be scientifical benefits! This dingbat could write about anything she wants, and her unacclaimed beekeeper murder mysteries are proof she knows this, and here she is rewording “go to church” like a 13-year-old padding out a 600 word essay on the benefits of steam power. There is so much unhappiness radiating off of this page of useless advice she might as well have just printed a picture of her favorite dead cat and typed, “only tragedy is forever, follow traffic laws and eat food.”

Holy shit. Meera suggests altering a picture of you to be thinner, less bald, and younger and putting it where you will see it. Where other people will see it. Let’s ignore how she put this in a section called “Be Happy With Yourself” because I think it’s more important to talk about how specific this type of happiness is, and how it only works on someone with the perfect combination of insecurity and lack of reasoning.

When you manufacture a delusion, you’re running the risk of any tiny thing shattering it. For instance, if you’re a balding lady and none of your jeans fit anymore, there’s no happiness in saying, “The joke’s on you, pants! Earlier I digitally unsagged my tits in McAfee FREEpaint and I can PROVE it!” This is imitation joy smeared across a tiny part of your brain and then dedicating your life to protecting it from reality. I have the same therapeutic credentials as this author, so all we are are two geniuses disagreeing, but if you deliberately hang onto a younger, hotter self-image, that’s not happiness. That’s taking out a happiness loan until the next time you see a mirror.

“Hello, police? First off, Meera was right. This does feel good. Secondly? I’ve been stabbed. I’m at the non-denominational sacred ritual meeting place on 36th street, and paramedics will know me by my still very firm and perky young breasts along with the face I had thirty five years ago.”

If this book was an injured animal, you would have bashed it to death forty entries ago to end its suffering. This desperate woman is so completely out of ideas she’s suggesting a key to happiness is “Wash Your Hands.” I feel like you can’t be less wise than this. In a very real way, this is as dumb as a person can be. And while I agree the pathway to true joy is having the least amount of uncooked chicken on your fingers, I can’t imagine a person who wouldn’t already have this as a core belief. I swear this lady is eight entries away from “Don’t Enjoy Poison.”

Meera, no! I was kidding!

This entry, stay away from poison, is peak Meera Lester. See, she’s not smart, but the thing that makes her magical is how she presents ideas with so little depth or nuance, she can’t even flesh them out. When forced, by herself, to elaborate on “Avoid Exposure to Toxic Chemicals,” she clarifies, “avoid exposure to all kinds of toxic agents.” That’s not helpful to anyone other than the person making sure you’re a fucking idiot.

A less-happy author might have thought, “Okay, maybe there’s nothing here, maybe I should explore more about crushing flowers,” but Meera pressed on. She suggested reading the safety instructions for all your chemicals including the ones for “your garden, lawn, and landscape.” Humans or fans of humans might recognize these as mostly the same thing, household chemically-speaking. By that I mean, when you finally find your lawn poison, you don’t scream at your wife for putting it with the goddamn landscape poisons.

Not all of Meera’s book is made up of impossibly general knowledge followed by babbling paragraphs of text re-explaining it several times. Some of it is based around wishing on things very hard, like a small child or a Jedi might do. On entry #101, she suggests setting aside five minutes every night to pray to be famous. But wording a wish this poorly is giving your monkey paw the easiest day at work it will ever have. Are you sure you want to be famous? Are you, Meera Lester, positive you want people outside your community of almost poison-drinkers to know about your work? I only ask, Meera Lester, self-help author (joy, religion, motivational, spiritual) whose lack of an Internet presence leaves her Google results extremely pliable, because someone failing in an ironic, spectacular way is a more compelling story than a struggling writer continuing with an unremarkable hobby. I’m worried, Meera Lester, author of 365 ways to Live Happy, that a careless pursuit of fame could lead a person to become known for something like… I don’t know, The Woman Who Accidentally Wrote the Saddest Happiness Book of All Time. Something to think about, motivational writer Meera Lester (net worth nude feet).

It’s pretty clear Meera’s mental health isn’t going to survive 365 happiness tips, but about a third into the book  she thought of a pretty clever way to shave a few off. She could just ask you, the reader, to come up with your own! Maybe your favorite music? She doesn’t know– you’re the you expert, asshole!

Sometimes people are sad because of finances, and realizing this unlocked a secret reserve of inspiration inside of Meera. It occurred to her if she could fix your money problems, she could fix your unhappiness, but how? Wait, never mind, she’s got it: wish for money only stupider than that sounds. And then, and this one also counts toward the 365 entries, guys: wish for money on paper. So now she has you taping a picture of money you’ll never have next to a picture of the face and body you never did have. I’m kind of serious when I ask this: does she think it counts as happiness when she makes everyone around her sadder by comparison? I mean, a lot of mental health professionals ask me how I stay so positive, and I guess it’s because putting my most pathetic delusions on display at my work space is a fun conversation starter! I also invented wishing! You’re right, I should write all these thoughts down in a book! Speaking of joyful wisdom, I’m going to go scream into a pillow.

Ha ha ha, holy fucking shit. Meera wrote an entire page about weeping into a pillow and then kicking its ass. And her hot mental health tip is to maybe buy a new one and fuck that one up too. A thing that legitimately brings me joy is imagining Meera Lester meeting a real therapist at a cocktail party and saying, “In my own way, I’m in the same line of work and I tell my readers, ‘patients’ if you will, to shriek into their bedding. There’s no way to know, but I imagine I’ve had some promising results. Do you also tell your patients to fix their tits and hairline in Photoshop? It’s so good to have a meeting of the minds like this, don’t you think?”

Everyone needs their community, so don’t be afraid to ask your friends for help. Any number of helpers is great, but five is how many Meera needs to become a bronze tier member of the NutriBlend Organic Salves Sales Force.

Things are really not going well for Meera’s multi-level salve business, but she has been assured, like she is assuring you now: a dream doesn’t become reality until you incubate it, and wait! Come back, you’re not done yet, also let it take flight. There’s really not much more to it than that!

Except, of course, sure– give the dream some rocket power. I feel like this one doesn’t need an explanation or a joke. You get it. It’s a dream with rockets. But back here in the real world we really need to start growing our downline of salve associates.

“I know I’ve talked to some of you about this opportunity before, but the money you’re leaving on the table by not investing early in this top quality salve business you can run from your home with unlimited growth is… it’s why I– why you’re unhappy. Excuse me, can you hand me that pillow please? No, this isn’t part of a pitch, it’s just a little happiness trick I came up with. I’ll only be a  moment, please enjoy the crushed lavender ₐᡒᡒᡒₑₑₑₑₑₑ!!!!! β‚‘β‚‘β‚‘β‚‘β‚‘β‚‘β‚‘β‚‘β‚‘β‚‘β‚‘β‚‘β‚‘β‚‘β‚‘β‚‘!!!! Now, who is ready to sign up for an Elite Salve Founder’s Kit? Who here is ready to live this kind of joy every day?”

Finances can be a tricky thing, so let’s go over what normally works. Did you try wishing for money? Okay, good, but did you picture yourself as a cartoon magnet money couldn’t resist? You tried that? What about writing down the number of moneys you want and putting it somewhere conspicuous? Well, it sounds like you’ve tried everythi– wait! Have you considered purchasing a magical money amulet?

You might think it’s a sign of low intelligence that it took Meera 182 entries before she remembered there were magical money amulets, but I think it shows her brilliance. She knew if she opened her book with unlimited wealth, you’d stop there and miss out on the rest of her advice. And what good is money if your hands are covered in toilet germs and you’re eating landscape poison?

So in the last ten entries, we have let our dream fly, given it rocket power, asked 11 friends to help, and celebrated it with a witchcraft totem. Now all that’s left to do is plan the victory party and make a list of what we’ll buy! Who knew being happy was as simple as being dumber than anyone who has ever lived and faking a dissociative disorder until it works? It reminds me of that movie The Matrix where the good guys knew the secret to paradise and were only trying to share it with everyone.

I’ve roasted Steven Seagal over two hundred times, but I’ve never ended an article more certain someone I made fun of is going to try to kill me.